Thomas J.R. Hughes
Distinguished Lecturer
Professor and holder of the John O. Hallquist Distinguished Chair in Computational Mechanics and the Peter O’Donnell Chair in Computational and Applied Mathematics
Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Cockrell School of Engineering
University of Texas at Austin
One of the most widely cited authors in Engineering Science, Thomas J.R. Hughes founded several fields of research, including isogeometric analysis, variational multiscale methods and stabilized methods.
His current research spans isogeometric analysis, which integrates Computer Aided Geometric Design and Finite Element Analysis to streamline product development, and computational medicine applications addressing cardiovascular disease, prostate cancer and glymphatic transport, along with phase field modeling of fracture and new discretization methods for structural and fluid dynamics simulations. His work continues to shape how complex physical systems are modeled and analyzed in real-world applications.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society of London, along with three other academies or societies. Hughes has been elected as a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), its highest honor.
He is a fellow of 10 academies or societies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
Honors include ASME’s highest honor, the ASME Medal; the von Karman Medal from ASCE; the Timoshenko Medal, the Worcester Reed Warner Medal and the Melville Medal from ASME; the von Neumann Medal from the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics; the Gauss-Newton Medal from the International Association for Computational Mechanics; the A.C. Eringen Medal from the Society for Engineering Science; the Ralph E. Kleinman Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; and the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics from City University of Hong Kong.
Hughes has authored or co-authored four books, 89 chapters and 341 peer-reviewed articles, co-edited 32 books and holds five patents. He is the co-editor for the Encyclopedia of Computational Mechanics and a member of 36 other editorial boards.
Hughes will collaborate with faculty and students in the College of Engineering.